PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from AO, who had, on the whole, not the best PPC campaign. The search advert was solely competing against sponsored shopping results, without any additions such as ad extensions to make the advert that bit more appealing. On top of this, the landing page was poorly designed for PPC, mainly because it was an existing web page that AO had used for PPC.

With this time of year being an extremely busy time online, due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I thought it would be interesting to see the competition there is for such search phrases. With this, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign from YorkTest.

To view YorkTest’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘black friday’:
Straight away, the competition for this search phrase isn’t actually that fierce. This is mainly due to the fact that the search phrase is too vague for competitors to bid for it – ‘black friday’ does not provide enough targeting to warrant advertisers bidding for it. The exception with this is obviously Amazon, where they pretty much sell anything and everything (so gaining traffic for this is perfect for them, as it is for people looking to save money with Black Friday sales).

On the other hand, with YorkTest, this is an example of poor keyword targeting. Looking at the search advert, YorkTest seemingly sell food intolerance tests, to allow people to see what food they could be intolerant against instead of having to find out the hard way of actually eating/drinking the food and seeing the results. Although this could apply to anyone, it is a specific target market that YorkTest should be aiming their PPC campaign at – bidding for the search phrase ‘black friday’ is, by far, too vague for the intended target market YorkTest should be aiming their PPC campaign at. This will result in YorkTest potentially paying for a lot of traffic that are uninterested in their landing page, increasing the cost per conversion they receive through PPC.

After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:

As already mentioned, this PPC campaign has faulted significantly already, simply due to the keyword targeting being too vague. If we can put this aside, the landing page has some good and bad points associated to it, highlighted below:

• YorkTest have made clear what differentiates them from competitors in the same industry, being the ‘Food Intolerance Testing Company of the Year 2018’.
• The advert does link with the contents of this landing page through the Black Friday banner advert, that appears above and below the fold of the page. However, what YorkTest have used to hurry people into purchasing from them is the fact that there is limited stock. Black Friday/Cyber Monday is meant to be a limited period of time there are sales, not a limited amount of stock. It would have been better to mention how long the Black Friday discount code would work for, rather than something ambiguous such as their stock levels.

However, this whole campaign can be deemed a flop. The keyword search phrase will not benefit YorkTest in anyway. If they wanted to bid for ‘black friday’, the minimum they need is a better explanation of what YorkTest offer, in terms of products or services, on their landing page (which they do not do). Ultimately, to improve this search phrase, more specific targeting is needed.